Decision
Last week I was responsible for a good amount of vocabulary for my REL 101 class and my EDU 200 class. In my religion class we had just started a new unit on Islam and were presented with a good deal of new material. A large portion of this material was vocab. As for my EDU class we had a midterm on Wednesday. Both my EDU and REL classes have a good amount of vocabulary words, and both of them have vocabulary quizzes. Vocab is something that I usually do well in; however, there are always those four or five words out of the fifty or so for each class that I always have trouble with, usually because they sound similar or mean similar things. To remedy this problem I used the LINK strategy.
Prep and Application
There wasn’t that much prep needed for the link strategy. For my religion class I simply took my notes from that day looked for the words that seemed the most difficult and used the strategy. For example, I took the word Kitab, which means scripture, and saw that kitab sort of sounds like kibab; then I drew a picture of a skewer impaling a bunch of scripture pages.
My EDU class was a different story. Since I had a midterm that I had already been preparing for, I had a stack of flash cards already. After studying profusely from the flash cards, I realized that there were a stack of at least 5 or 6 words that I was not grasping as much as the other ones. For these words I used the link strategy. I drafted new cards for each word, and before writing the definition on the card I created an image for the term. This helped a lot because instead of drawing a blank or getting flustered with words I didn’t know I could simply picture the image I had created and work out the definition from there.
Evaluation
I am a visual learner so images like this help me a lot. It actually helps me learn the material rather than just memorizing a definition. The actions taken to use the LINK strategy are fairly minimal and can fit in any twenty-minute test prep or after class organization. The materials are even more minimal. All I used for this was my class notes and my flash cards. I evaluate this strategy very highly and recommend it for anyone who is a visual learner or has trouble learning key terms.
Something that Dr. Blumin mentioned last week was that when you are using LINK, your pictures or ideas that you come up with to memorize the words should be "out there" and exaggerated. For example, for "kitab" you should think of THOUSANDS of kibabs with scripture pages on them. I believe that the crazier it is, the easier it will be to remember.
ReplyDeleteI was actually about to say the same exact thing that Jimmy just said. But I do like your explanation of LAME because as I am a visual learner your depictions of this strategy will help me out.
ReplyDelete